Iranian-Americans in Silicon Valley are Getting More Powerful

Today marked another milestone for the Iranian-American tech community in Silicon Valley. Uber’s board of directors appointed Tehran-Born Dara Khosrowshahi as its new CEO after the controversies around its founder, Travis Kalanick. As Pejman Nozad eloquently puts, “The Persian Mafia in Tech gets $70B bigger!”.

Dara Khosrowshahi is not the only Iranian-American executive in tech. Many Iranian-Americans have founded, invested in, or reached the top ranks of some of the most prominent Silicon Valley companies. The close-knit community of Iranian-Americans and the high value of education in the Iranian culture and families is one of the reasons our community is getting more powerful day by day.

Let’s take look at some of the most prominent founders, funders, and executives in tech of Iranian heritage.

Dara Khosrowshahi: CEO of Uber. Ex-CEO of Expedia.

Ali & Hadi Partovi: Ali c0-founded LinkExchange and Hadi co-founded Tellme Networks. Both companies were acquired by Microsoft. The brothers are early investors in Facebook, Dropbox, AirBnB, Uber, Zappos, and many other startups. They then started Code.org, a non-profit organization which teaches computer science and coding to students.

Amir Khosrowshahi: co-founder of Nervana (AI company) acq. by Intel for $400M. Bonus point: the 4 people above, as well as some other prominent entrepreneurs are all relatives. Check this Washington Post article.

Shervin Pishevar: Co-founder/executive chairman of Hyperloop One and co-founder/managing director of Sherpa Capital. Previously he was a managing director at Menlo Ventures where he led investments in Uber, and Warby Parker. Before that he founded WebOS.

Pierre Omidyar: Founder of eBay.

Pejman Nozad: co-founder and managing director of Pear Ventures which has invested in Dropbox, LendingClub, Gusto, Guardant Health, Philz Coffee, DoorDash, etc. Previously he invested in PayPal as part of Amidzad Ventures. He has an amazing (someone should literally make a Hollywood movie!) life-story, read it here.

Arash Ferdowsi:co-founder/CTO Dropbox

Omid Kordestani: Executive Chairman of Twitter and previously Chief Business Officer of Google

Bob Miner: co-founder of Oracle

Keyvon Beykpour: Co-Founder/CEO of Persicope (acquired by Twitter)

Bobby Yazdani: co-founder and managing director of Cota Capital and Signatures Capital where he has invested in Google, Dropbox, Uber, Bonobos, Bina, Salesforce, etc. Previously he founded Saba Software and took it IPO.

Saeed Amidi: Founder/CEO of Plug and Play Tech Center, one of the largest start-up incubators and super early stage investors in Silicon Valley.

Sean Rad: Founder of Tinder!

Lily Sarafan: CEO of Home Care Assistance (HCA) with 6,500+ employees and $200M+ in annual revenues

Kamran Elahian: Chairman and co-founder of Global Catalyst Partners, an international multi-stage Venture Capital. Previously founded Cirrus Logic (took to IPO) and many other semiconductor companies.

Mohsen Moazami: Managing Director at Columbus Nova Technology Partners. Previously he was a VP at Cisco and before that, he founded Stanford Business Systems which was acquired by Kurt Salmon Associates.

The list of successful Iranian-Americans in Silicon Valley is definitely much larger than the above and I have for sure missed some prominent names in this list. Also, I have not included some very prominent scientists like Dr. Firouz Naderi, Dr. Nader Engheta, etc. in this list.

What I am very excited about is the next generation of Iranian-American entrepreneurs and the rising stars. To name a few I would list: